For all Novell Suse Linux and SAP on Suse Linux questions releated to OS and BI solutions. And offcourse also for the great RedHat products like RedHat Enterprise Server and JBoss middelware and BI on RedHat.

Xen Hypervisor

The Xen hypervisor was first created by Keir Fraser and Ian Pratt as part of the Xenoserver research project at Cambridge University in the late 1990s. A hypervisor "forms the core of each Xenoserver node, providing the resource management, accounting and auditing that we require." The earliest web page dedicated to the Xen hypervisor is still available on Cambridge web servers. The early Xen history can easily be traced through a variety of academic papers from Cambridge University. Controlling the XenoServer Open Platform is an excellent place to begin in understanding the origins of the Xen hypervisor and the XenoServer project. Other relevant research papers can be found at:

Over the years, the Xen community has hosted several Xen Summit events where the global development community meets to discuss all things Xen. Many presentations and videos of those events are available here.

Why Xen Project?

The Xen Project team is a global open source community that develops the Xen Project Hypervisor and its associated subprojects. Xen (pronounced /’zɛn/) Project has its origins in the ancient greek term Xenos (ξένος), which can be used to refer to guest-friends whose relationship is constructed under the ritual of xenia ("guest-friendship"), which in term is a wordplay on the idea of guest operating systems as well as a community of developers and users. The original website was created in 2003 to allow a global community of developers to contribute and improve the hypervisor. Click on the link to find more about the projects’s interesting history.

What Differentiates the Xen Project Software?

There are several virtualization technologies available in the world today. Our Xen Project virtualization and cloud software includes many powerful features which make it an excellent choice for many organizations:

Supports multiple guest operating systems: Linux, Windows, NetBSD, FreeBSDA virtualization technology which only supports a few guest operating systems essentially locks the organization into those choices for years to come. With our hypervisor, you have the flexibility to use what you need and add other operating system platforms as your needs dictate. You are in control.

VMware Alternative: Using Xen Server for Virtualization

Supports multiple Cloud platforms: CloudStack, OpenStackA virtualization technology which only supports one Cloud technology locks you into that technology. With the world of the Cloud moving so quickly, it could be a mistake to commit to one Cloud platform too soon. Our software keeps your choices open as Cloud solutions continue to improve and mature.
Reliable technology with a solid track recordThe hypervisor has been in production for many years and is the #1 Open Source hypervisor according to analysts such as Gartner. Conservative estimates show that Xen has an active user base of 10+ million: these are users, not merely hypervisor installations which are an order of magnitude higher. Amazon Web Services alone runs ½ million virtualized Xen Project instances according to a recent study and other cloud providers such as Rackspace and hosting companies use the hypervisor at extremely large scale. Companies such as Google and Yahoo use the hypervisor at scale for their internal infrastructure. Our software is the basis of successful commercial products such as Citrix XenServer and Oracle VM, which support an ecosystem of more than 2000 commercially certified partners today. It is clear that many major industry players regard our software as a safe virtualization platform for even the largest clouds.

ScalabilityThe hypervisor can scale up to 4,095 host CPUs with 16Tb of RAM. Using Para Virtualization (PV), the hypervisor supports a maximum of 512 VCPUs with 512Gb RAM per guest. Using Hardware Virtualization (HVM), it supports a maximum of 128 VCPUs with 1Tb RAM per guest.

SecuritySecurity is one of the major concerns when moving critical services to virtualization or cloud computing environments. The hypervisor provides a high level of security due to its modular architecture, which separates the hypervisor from the control and guest operating systems. The hypervisor itself is thin and thus provides a minimal attack surface. The software also contains the Xen Security Modules (XSM), which have been developed and contributed to the project by the NSA for ultra secure use-cases. XSM introduces control policy providing fine-grained controls over its domains and their interaction amongst themselves and the outside world. And, of course, it is also possible to use the hypervisor with SELinux. In addition, Xen’s Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) subsystems make it the best hypervisor for security applications. For more information, see Virtual Machine Introspection with Xen and VM Introspection: Practical Applications.

The Xen Project also has a dedicated security team, which handles security vulnerabilities in accordance with our Security Policy. Unlike almost all corporations and even most open source projects, the Xen Project properly discloses, via an advisory, every vulnerability discovered in supported configurations. We also often publish advisories about vulnerabilities in other relevant projects, such as Linux and QEMU.

FlexibilityOur hypervisor is the most flexible hypervisor on the market, enabling you to tailor your installation to your needs. There are lots of choices and trade-offs that you can make. For example: the hypervisor works on older hardware using paravirtualization, on newer hardware using HVM or PV on HVM. Users can choose from three tool stacks (XL, XAPI & LIBVIRT), from an ecosystem of software complementing the project and choose the most suitable flavour of Linux and Unix operating system for their needs. Further, the project's flexible architecture enables vendors to create Xen-based products and services for servers, cloud, desktop in particular for ultra secure environments.

ModularityOur architecture is uniquely modular, enabling a degree of scalability, robustness, and security suitable even for large, critical, and extremely secure environments. The control functionality in our control domain can be divided into small modular domains running a minimal kernel and a driver, control logic or other functionality: we call this approach Domain Disaggregation. Disaggregated domains are conceptually similar to processes in an operating system. They can be started/ended on demand, without affecting the rest of the system. Disaggregated domains reduce attack surface and distribute bottlenecks. It enables you to restart an unresponsive device driver without affecting your VMs.

Analysis of the Xen code review process: An example of software development analytics

VM MigrationThe software supports Virtual Machine Migration. This allows you to react to changing loads on your servers, protecting your workloads.
Open SourceOpen Source means that you have influence over the direction of the code. You are not at the mercy of some immovable external organization which may have priorities which do not align with your organization. You can participate and help ensure that your needs are heard in the process. And you never have to worry that some entity has decided to terminate the product for business reasons. An Open Source project will live as long as there are parties interested in advancing the software.

Multi-vendor supportThe project enjoys support from a number of major software and service vendors. This gives end-users numerous places to find support, as well as numerous service providers to work with. With such a rich commercial ecosystem around the project, there is plenty of interest in keeping the project moving forward to ever greater heights.

KVM or Xen? Choosing a Virtualization Platform

When Xen was first released in 2002, the GPL'd hypervisor looked likely to take the crown as the virtualization platform for Linux. Fast forward to 2010, and the new kid in town has displaced Xen as the virtualization of choice for Red Hat and lives in the mainline Linux kernel. Which one to choose? Read on for our look at the state of Xen vs. KVM.

Things in virtualization land move pretty fast. If you don't have time to keep up with the developments in KVM or Xen development, it's a bit confusing to decide which one (if either) you ought to choose. This is a quick look at the state of the market between Xen and KVM.

KVM and Xen

Xen is a hypervisor that supports x86, x86_64, Itanium, and ARM architectures, and can run Linux, Windows, Solaris, and some of the BSDs as guests on their supported CPU architectures. It's supported by a number of companies, primarily by Citrix, but also used by Oracle for Oracle VM, and by others. Xen can do full virtualization on systems that support virtualization extensions, but can also work as a hypervisor on machines that don't have the virtualization extensions.

KVM is a hypervisor that is in the mainline Linux kernel. Your host OS has to be Linux, obviously, but it supports Linux, Windows, Solaris, and BSD guests. It runs on x86 and x86-64 systems with hardware supporting virtualization extensions. This means that KVM isn't an option on older CPUs made before the virtualization extensions were developed, and it rules out newer CPUs (like Intel's Atom CPUs) that don't include virtualization extensions. For the most part, that isn't a problem for data centers that tend to replace hardware every few years anyway — but it means that KVM isn't an option on some of the niche systems like the SM10000 that are trying to utilize Atom CPUs in the data center.

If you want to run a Xen host, you need to have a supported kernel. Linux doesn't come with Xen host support out of the box, though Linux has been shipping with support to run natively as a guest since the 2.6.23 kernel. What this means is that you don't just use a stock Linux distro to run Xen guests. Instead, you need to choose a Linux distro that ships with Xen support, or build a custom kernel. Or go with one of the commercial solutions based on Xen, like Citrix XenServer. The problem is that those solutions are not entirely open source.

And many do build custom kernels, or look to their vendors to do so. Xen is running on quite a lot of servers, from low-cost Virtual Private Server (VPS) providers like Linode to big boys like Amazon with EC2. A TechTarget article demonstrates how providers that have invested heavily in Xen are not likely to switch lightly. Even if KVM surpasses Xen technically, they're not likely to rip and replace the existing solutions in order to take advantage of a slight technical advantage.

And KVM doesn't yet have the technical advantage anyway. Because Xen has been around a bit longer, it also has had more time to mature than KVM. You'll find some features in Xen that haven't yet appeared in KVM, though the KVM project has a lengthy TODO list that they're concentrating on. (The list isn't a direct match for parity with Xen, just a good idea what the KVM folks are planning to work on.) KVM does have a slight advantage in the Linux camp of being the anointed mainline hypervisor. If you're getting a recent Linux kernel, you've already got KVM built in. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 included KVM support and the company is dropping Xen support for KVM in RHEL 6.

This is, in part, an endorsement of how far KVM has come technically. Not only does Red Hat have the benefit of employing much of the talent behind KVM, there's the benefit of introducing friction to companies that have cloned Red Hat Enterprise Linux and invested heavily in Xen. By dropping Xen from the roadmap, they're forcing other companies to drop Xen or pick up maintenance of Xen and diverging from RHEL. This means extra engineering costs, requiring more effort for ISV certifications, etc.

KVM isn't entirely on par with Xen, though it's catching up quickly. It has matured enough that many organizations feel comfortable deploying it in production. So does that mean Xen is on the way out? Not so fast.

There Can Be Only One?

The choice of KVM vs. Xen is as likely to be dictated by your vendors as anything else. If you're going with RHEL over the long haul, bank on KVM. If you're running on Amazon's EC2, you're already using Xen, and so on. The major Linux vendors seem to be standardizing on KVM, but there's plenty of commercial support out there for Xen. Citrix probably isn't going away anytime soon.

It's tempting in the IT industry to look at technology as a zero sum game where one solution wins and another loses. The truth is that Xen and KVM are going to co-exist for years to come. The market is big enough to support multiple solutions, and there's enough backing behind both technologies to ensure that they do well for years to come.